149. Question Time: How to end a civil war, psychedelic treatments, and will the Orkney Islands join Norway?

Why are the Orkney islands looking to explore options around joining Norway? Are psychedelics the future of mental health treatment? Does the path to a Labour majority include winning over National Trust members? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more on today's Question Time podcast. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:47Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. So before we go on, just to thank everybody who bought tickets for the Albert Hall in December. Sold out in under a day, thousands of people trying to get through who couldn't. We are so grateful. We're actually quite shocked, to be honest, that yet again, we've sold it out. We've also already sold out Bath and Edinburgh that we're doing in September. Sorry to those who didn't get tickets, but we will hopefully be doing more shows in 2024.

• 2:18Rory Stewart?

  And Alison, I'm apologising if this comes over the podcast. I'm sitting in blazing sunshine in Cape Cod and there's some very hardworking American out there with some kind of lawn mowing device buzzing in the background. And you have a bit of a sniff I'm picking up. Are you ill?

• 2:34Alastair Campbell?

  Got really, really bad hay fever.

• 2:36Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I'm sorry.

• 2:37Alastair Campbell?

  And I'm breathing badly.

• 2:38Rory Stewart?

  Have you, have you always had that?

• 2:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I've always had it and but some days I get it real. The last couple of days has been horrific and I barely slept last night, but just it's been horrible. I mean, you know, this is what happens if you spend too much time watching cricket.

• 2:53Rory Stewart?

  Is the hay fever particularly bad? It's because they keep mowing the lawn or something?

• 2:57Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know what it is. No, I think there's something going on in the air at the moment. Grace, my daughter has got it really badly as well.

• 3:02Rory Stewart?

  And I mean, it's been horrible here in the States. In New York, I went for a walk along the High Line, which is that amazing planted tram line. And the Canadian wildfire particles in the air.

• 3:12Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:13Rory Stewart?

  And all the websites saying do not go outside dangerous levels and, you know, people taking their kids out of playgrounds. It's very, very unpleasant.

• 3:22Alastair Campbell?

  And I do, I do know that, you know, I know that Sadiq Khan's ULEZ extension plans are quite controversial. But I do feel when I'm in London, compared to say when I'm in, you know, I don't know, Scotland or, you know, Scottish Highlands or, you know, the countryside around Burnley. I find, I find it much harder to, to keep my breath at the levels that it needs to be and not get wheezy. I do get very wheezy in life if I spend a lot of time in London.

• 3:49Rory Stewart?

  It's a terrible thing. And I mean, I'm, no, my, my criticism of Sadiq Khan actually is that he, he didn't move more quickly. I think the air quality in Britain is a total disgrace. Probably, you know, 26,000 or more people a year dying prematurely because of our, all types of pollution. That's the nitrogen dioxide, that's sulfur dioxide, this is particulate maca. But here's a fact on this one. The forest fires in Canada since early May have generated nearly 600 million tonnes of CO2. That's equivalent to 88% of the country's total greenhouse gas emissions from all sources in 2021.

• 4:26Alastair Campbell?

  Well, talking of total disgraces, James Reese, I watched the Dispatches programme on Johnson-Lebedev. Why hasn't there been immediate action taken to investigate treason?

• 4:36Rory Stewart?

  I thought that was a really, really strong series of things. I thought they did it well.

• 4:41Alastair Campbell?

  Did you not find it incredible? It didn't get, I think it got picked up by the rest of the media because it was a Channel 4 documentary, so the BBC didn't cover it as far as I saw. I thought it was absolutely scandalous.

• 4:53Rory Stewart?

  And actually, they told the story very well. They had some very strong people to interview, including some ex-MI6 figures and Simon McDonald, who was the permanent secretary in the Foreign Office. They told the story well. It was a shocking story. But anyway, we've talked about that some length. So anyone interested, they can go back to last week's show. Here's a question. Jesse Grimmond, not Jesse Grimmond, I think I might know Jesse Grimmond. After many years of debate about Europe, is it time to wage a weary peace on Brexit and devote the oxygen of politics to waging a climate and biodiversity war? Zach Goldsmith has pointed out, the PM is clearly not committing his troops in this small window of opportunity for mitigation.

• 5:33Rory Stewart?

  So to remind listeners, Lord Goldsmith resigned as a junior environment minister and in doing so criticised Rishi Sunak for not doing enough on climate. And we should point out, Zach Goldsmith is a big, big supporter of Boris Johnson, and this may well have played into this. What did you make of all that?

• 5:52Alastair Campbell?

  Look, I think Zach Goldsmith, despite those connections to Johnson, I think he does have relatively serious credentials on the environment. But I've been involved in a few resignation letters in my time, Ministry of Resignations. I thought it was one of the most brutal I've ever seen. And it really was quite personal about Sunak. And, you know, obviously there is politics involved in that, probably related to Boris Johnson, but...

• 6:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, the politics on that was that Sunak's reply said, didn't he, that in his first paragraph, before he thanked him for his service, he said, "We'd asked you to apologise for your attacks on the Privileges Committee." This is the Privileges Committee which had... Had criticised Boris Johnson and you declined to do so, although I think Zach Goldsmith's then subsequently come out saying he had apologised for his attacks on the Privilege Committee.

• 6:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but Sunak doesn't really, you don't get the sense when Sunak is out there talking about things that matter to him, you don't really get the sense that he has any real commitment on the climate. I mean, it's not one of his five priorities that he takes around with him in that backdrop. I can't, I actually, I look at, for example, I can recall David Cameron making speeches about the environment, I can recall that photograph of him up in the Arctic Circle.

• 7:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Alastair Campbell?

  I can recall him, even though he didn't deliver it, I can recall him saying he was going to lead the greenest government ever. I don't sense that Sunak is on this pitch or thinks that he should be on this pitch. And I think this goes back to this problem with the right wing, who frankly think this whole net zero thing is for the birds. I mean, the right wing papers are always sort of, you know, taking the side that I would argue is sort of pretty close to climate change denial.

• 7:32Rory Stewart?

  One of the things that's made me very sad, and this actually is another listener who wrote in, who's asked to remain anonymous, but a friend of mine has said that one of the things that we should focus on is how sad it is that by leaving the European Union, Britain has dropped out of some of the very good moves that the Commission's now making on reuse of glass, for example. I mean, one of the disgraces in Britain is that the glass companies, under both Labour and Conservative, run these extraordinary lobbying operations to try to convince politicians that somehow it's not economical to recycle glass or reuse glass, which is mad. I mean, all the way across Europe, people do it, glass can be reused 100 times without any degradation in it.

• 8:17Rory Stewart?

  And yet it suits the bottom line of these companies to pretend it can't be done at all and keep making new stuff.

• 8:22Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Rory, here's a great question. Steve Phillips, was there ever a meeting where you felt completely out of your depth and didn't know what to do? And how did you react? Panic, bluster or other? It's something we've likely all encountered at one time or another, interested to know if you two have and how you handled it. I can remember going to a lecture at university by somebody called George Steiner.

• 8:47Rory Stewart?

  George Steiner, I can do a good impression of George Steiner.

• 8:49Alastair Campbell?

  Can you?

• 8:50Rory Stewart?

  I remember going to hear him at university as well. He said, "In the Talmudic tradition in which there is a prohibition not just on the name of God, but on the name of the name of God, we approach Plato's Nomoi, his latest and most terrible work, whose only word I can find to describe it is Enormete, in which the epsilon stresses not privates, emphasizing that which is outside the norms."

• 9:13Alastair Campbell?

  How can you remember that?

• 9:15Rory Stewart?

  Well, it rather struck me at the time.

• 9:16Alastair Campbell?

  What I was going to say is that I went to see this lecture and I then sort of hung around thinking, I'd like to sort of have a chat with him afterwards. And then I just felt completely unworthy. I thought, this guy is just too clever. I cannot go and talk to him. I'm not on his level. Nobody in politics has ever like fed on me, I have to say.

• 9:37Rory Stewart?

  I think the, I think the experience of a politician, as a working politician, is that we're perpetually out of our depth. And we're completely out of our depth all the time. I mean, the idea that we can actually have our minds around all the different countries in the world, all the different departments of government. And of course, that's the assumption. You go on question time or somebody sticks a microphone in your face and you're supposed to have a snappy answer to which taxes would you cut if you had a choice? Or what are you going to do about the ambulance service in the north west of England? And so you're perpetually kind of blanking. And one of the reasons why politicians seem so grotesque and artificial is that we're very bad at saying, frankly, I don't know.

• 10:17Alastair Campbell?

  No, that is absolutely right. I mean, I look on a more superficial level. So when we were talking to Paul Nurse, the great scientist at the Crick Institute, which is a future episode of Leading, I mean, I felt out of my depth in that when he talked about, you know, cells splitting, I didn't really have a sense of what he was talking about. But the great thing I think about being in, in the political world or being in the media is you can ask questions. And, you know, that's how you get on their level is in a way by asking questions. But I felt, I felt with George Steiner that there was any question I asked, he would sort of look at me and think, you know, that's a really stupid question.

• 10:55Rory Stewart?

  I'm not sure. I probably, probably, probably, probably would like you, probably would like you. Right. Are Labour to blame for Russian influence in UK politics? Next one. The whole Russian influence in UK politics and the ex KGB spy, so this is Alexander Lebedev, buying British newspapers started while Labour were in power. Boris Johnson was the end destination, but Labour helped get it all started. Alistair always seems to gloss over this. I think that's a bit unfair on you, actually, to be honest. And the last thing, you did actually mention the fact that Peter Mandelson was involved and it was John Gordon Brown. Anyway, never seems to want to discuss it at length. I'd be interested in hearing about more about this. Why Labour let it happen? What they hope to achieve from letting ex KGB spies settling and buying influence? And also what should be done about it now?

• 11:38Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, maybe a question related to that from John Dennis. How might a Labour government reform the media? What could Starmer do to stop the likes of GB News doing to the UK what Fox News did to the US? I've said before, I do think that actually there would be nothing wrong in having some sort of nationality recognition in relation to media ownership. I do think it's wrong that so much of our media is owned by people who have got, who don't pay tax here, who are parts of bigger global political entities. They're players, not, I mean, the numbers, the figures of the sums that are being lost by the people backing GB News, because they don't care about the money, it's about buying influence.

• 12:19Rory Stewart?

  When you see Peter Mandelson's speech in the House of Lords justifying Lebedev taking over the Standard and the Independent.

• 12:26Alastair Campbell?

  Which was on the documentary.

• 12:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, which was on documentary. He points out that, of course, without him, these things are going to crash. And one of the fundamental problems is these things are massively loss-making. And so long as you're asking for people to take over completely loss-making enterprises, you are inviting people either with unbelievable sums of money, many of whom live overseas, or people with an incredible conflicts of interest, who are prepared to invest hundreds of millions of pounds into loss-making enterprises to achieve political objectives. So one of the problems structurally is that these things are not going businesses, are they?

• 13:04Alastair Campbell?

  No, exactly. And that's why people like Rupert Murdoch have made themselves not just powerful, but one of the, you know, is also incredibly wealthy. But I think today you're not going to get rich buying one of these old fashioned newspapers. Indeed, I don't know if you saw that the the Wiener Zeitung in Austria, which is the oldest national newspaper in the world, it's printed its final edition after three hundred and twenty years.

• 13:29Rory Stewart?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 13:30Alastair Campbell?

  So the, you know, newspapers are struggling. And if you look at the Evening Standard, I mean, it's a very, very, very thin paper now. So somebody like Lebedev wants it, in part, as the, as Nick Swan rightly says, to be an influential player within British society.

• 13:47Rory Stewart?

  Well, I mean, there's, there's an incredible graph online on the decline of newspapers. So on billions of today's dollars, it rises from nineteen fifty newspaper print revenue, twenty billion dollars. By the year two thousand, it peaks seventy billion dollars and then it falls off a cliff by twenty fifteen, down to sort of just over eleven billion dollars. And it's, this is partly, isn't it, about the collapse in advertising? And one of the things that the rise of social media has done is move a lot of the advertising revenue away from printed newspapers to other places.

• 14:22Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. And, you know, newspapers, a lot of newspapers are fighting for their life. And, you know, some of them, frankly, it wouldn't bother me if they went to the war. But I do think at the moment, we need good, healthy journalism more than ever because we're living in this post-truth political world. The problem is that a lot of our media are part of that post-truth world. They're not actually challenging the liars, they're part of them.

• 14:44Rory Stewart?

  And what financial strategies they have to pursue is very difficult, isn't it? So most newspapers around the world, dropping a readership by two or three percent a year, year on year.

• 14:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:56Rory Stewart?

  The number of newspaper firms is absolutely extraordinary. The US, if you look at a graph, goes from six thousand two hundred and two thousand to about four thousand two hundred today. So I mean, it's, it's just, in every bit of the industry is collapsing and that leaves you very vulnerable to unscrupulous billionaires coming in.

• 15:13Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. Yep. So yeah, I don't think I've glossed over it, but and I think I broadly agree with the thrust of the question, but I think I guess the point was the one that Peter Mandel was making. And I can't remember at the time, to be honest, was there anybody else that was in to buy it? I think you always find people who want to buy newspapers, but those figures you've just given us show that it's it's a story, you know, moving from their perspective in the wrong direction. Fee Posnett, has Alistair ever thought of returning to the classroom and teaching as Rory did, but not the Royals? I think he means not for me to teach the Royals. He, that's me, always seems so great with the students he meets.

• 15:50Rory Stewart?

  Oh.

• 15:51Alastair Campbell?

  Thank you very much.

• 15:52Rory Stewart?

  Beautiful.

• 15:53Alastair Campbell?

  And they need modern languages teachers. I am going to a lot of schools at the moment. And I'm actually, I can't tell you, Rory, I don't know whether you're going to do something like this with your book when it comes out, but it's giving me so much sort of hope that things might not be as bad as I thought when I was writing the first part of the book. Because I just think there is, you know, I was in a school last week where the kids were just like, they were on it in a way that I just think we don't maybe sometimes feel when we're with older people.

• 16:19Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think almost any time I get out and meet anyone, I feel cheered up. It's generally the graphs that make me gloomy.

• 16:26Alastair Campbell?

  [laughing]

• 16:28Rory Stewart?

  But you'd be a great teacher. You never thought of teaching there, did you? No.

• 16:31Alastair Campbell?

  I taught, I did teach for a year when I was a student because I did languages and I taught in Nice. I was an assistant d'anglais. I don't think I am a very good teacher. I think I'm a, I think I'm a good motivator and I can hopefully inspire a few people. But I think my kids would would admit I'm not very patient when it comes to.

• 16:50Rory Stewart?

  Patience, that's right. That's it. You're not famous for your patience.

• 16:53Alastair Campbell?

  I don't have that patience to think, you know, I want people to, if I explain something once, Rory, that should be enough. I've explained it clearly. Why can't you understand it? So no, I don't think I'd be a great teacher, but I do love going to schools and and I love the fact that I'm feeling so much kind of political passion in there right now.

• 17:11Rory Stewart?

  On language teaching, just quickly before we move off it, I really loved learning languages after I left school, really enjoyed it. And I really enjoyed just chatting to people, learning to talk. But I didn't adjust at all well to the way in which languages were taught at my school at Eton, which was much more about formally memorising sixty words in the evening, focusing on the grammar rules, very, very kind of structural approach to it, rather than sort of chit-chatting away. Do you think that sometimes people are put off, or is it just that certain people's minds work differently and maybe the more structured approach works for some and the more chatty approach for others?

• 17:48Alastair Campbell?

  I think you have to have both, and luckily I did have both, but when I was at school, because we had, you know, it's interesting how you remember your teachers. I mean, my German teacher, Mr Webster, I just, I loved the way he taught. But at the same time, we went out and had conversations with real Germans and we went, you know, this is the other wretchedness of this bloody Brexit thing, the whole kind of school trip thing. You know, the first time I ever went abroad was on a school trip and it was, I was able to speak French and German on both, on the trip, because we went to Belgium and we went to Germany. And we had both. And then we also had students who came from France to, you know, to be in our school. And to, you know, so you could, if you were interested,

• 18:33Alastair Campbell?

  you could, you could have conversations with them as well. So I think, I think you need both. But let's be honest, we're just not, we are not good at languages. And I think it's part of the whole post-empire thing, you know, we, we expect everybody, everybody to speak English. And, you know, I'm with you, I get such, you get such joy out of learning new, new things in foreign languages.

• 18:52Rory Stewart?

  It's, it's an amazing luxury and it's, it's obviously difficult to afford. But if you can do it, my, the best experience I ever had was I had three months in Indonesia and Jogjakarta, so a few hundred miles outside the capital city, where I did two hours one on one with one teacher, then two hours one on one with another teacher, then two hours one on one with a third teacher every day. So I'd do six hours conversation practice every day with three different voices. Homework in the evening, do it again the next day. And I found within three months, I'd made so much progress in a way that I never would have been able to in a couple of lessons a week in school.

• 19:27Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm hmm. I don't know. I think Labour, well, there's a lot of stuff to do in education, but I really do wish we'd get back on the on the languages front. What about this one? John Daniels. Australia has now legalized the use of psychedelics for treating mental health, mental illness. Do you perhaps think the UK government is sleeping on their potential? Another one, Jack Webb. Australia has legalized psychedelics and MDMA for use in mental health conditions off the back of evidence largely from the UK. Some US states and parts of Western Europe have already moved on this. When will we catch up to implement the science done here? Funny enough, in this very building where I am, I'm out in Chiswick, on the way I was walking in here, a guy stopped me and told me he was on a research programme

• 20:10Alastair Campbell?

  for psychedelics starting tomorrow. So he's had to come off his antidepressants. I was asked to, I was actually offered the chance of doing it, but I was too scared to come off my antidepressants. You have to come off the antidepressants before you go on the psychedelics programme. But it's, it is really interesting that the, you know, most of the research work has been done here. And now Australia has, has taken that huge step forward.

• 20:34Rory Stewart?

  And is this something you'd advise the Labour government to, to talk about in the lead up to election? Or would it just create too much controversy and distract from where they're going?

• 20:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'd love to hear the Labour government talk about more about mental health. But I, I don't know whether it would. I mean, I think people are kind of ready for a more grown up discussion on, on mental health and in fact on drugs. I mean, when we were talking in the main podcast about France, we didn't really, we didn't really get into the issue of drugs. But there's a lot of people in the Marseille area saying that they could stop all this trouble down there, they think, or most of it, if, if they just took the crime out of drugs and, you know, created a market in it and then created proper healthcare system around it, et cetera. I, when I made a BBC documentary about depression, I, I followed this guy who was on this psychedelics programme. And he had, I mean, such awful

• 21:24Alastair Campbell?

  depression and had had it ever since a really horrible abusive childhood. And he said that when he was on this programme, it was the best he's ever been. But then he had to come off it because it's, it's not legal, because it's a, it's a class A drug.

• 21:42Rory Stewart?

  Okay, Neil Lawson. So Mark Rabbit asks, when 83% of Labour Party members want proportional representation, but a small clique at the top of the Labour Party try to hound out people like Neil Lawson, what should members, trade unions and local parties do? So what's this Neil Lawson story? Because we had another Labour Party, senior Labour Party figure hounded out about a month ago, didn't we, for getting on a stage with Ken Loach? What's Neil Lawson done? Oh, that's right, he retweeted people. Then he retweeted somebody suggesting that they might want to vote for another party to do some tactical voting, is that right?

• 22:14Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think he's been expelled. I think he's been sent a letter asking for an explanation because it is against the rules of the party to recommend voting for somebody else. However, this is one of the reasons why I'm perhaps a little reluctant to rejoin the Labour Party, because when it comes to the general election, I am going to be urging tactical voting. We've got these violations coming up shortly. If I were living in Somerset, Labour are not going to win this by election in Somerset and Froom. So I would vote Lib Dem. If I was up in Selby, I would vote Labour. But I don't know the full story. I do remember Neil Lawson when he was running Compass. He could, you know, he was a thorn in our side at times.

• 22:56Rory Stewart?

  Tell us about Compass. Tell us a bit about Compass.

• 22:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's a think tank. It's a sort of left-leaning think tank. They occasionally come up with some good ideas. And, you know, like a lot of think tanks, they get coverage and attention, sometimes legitimately, by criticizing government policy. And we were the government at the time, and they could be quite critical. But I don't think we'd ever have thought of kicking him out of the party. You know, the one we talked about before, Jamie Driscoll, I did have quite a lot of people in the North East contacting me and saying, look, you know, I get what you're saying on the point and principle about sharing a platform with Ken Loach, but Jamie Driscoll's not been a very effective mayor.

• 23:31Rory Stewart?

  That's not a reason to expel him, is it?

• 23:33Alastair Campbell?

  No, but if we go back to the Australian winner-all-costs mentality point, you know, put it this way, that to me is a better reason than the fact that he shared a platform with somebody.

• 23:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 23:48Alastair Campbell?

  So I think Labour's got to be a bit careful on this front.

• 23:50Rory Stewart?

  The Neil Lawson article in The Guardian says that they've got rid of their even mildly radical policies. They seem to be backing away from policies on rent controls, backing away from the £28 billion a year green transition, flirting with Rupert Murdoch.

• 24:06Rory Stewart?

  And at the same time, putting so much effort into this sort of cleaning house business of asserting the authority or the discipline of the party leader. And why is that? Is that that Keir Starmer feels sort of traumatised or haunted by Labour disunity in the past? I mean, why are they so? Why would you? I mean, does it make sense to pick a fight with Neil Lawson? Why would you want to do that when the guy can immediately write an article in The Guardian saying this is outrageous attack on progressive politics?

• 24:33Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think to be that worried about Neil Lawson, as it were, in particular, as an individual. But I think there's no doubt that Keir Starmer wants to keep communicating to the public the message that this is a changed Labour Party, this is a serious Labour Party, this is a party that's, you know, not going to allow the sort of nonsense that we had in the Corbyn years. So I guess that's what's behind this. But I'll be honest, I haven't followed it as closely as it sounds that you have.

• 25:02Rory Stewart?

  So here's another question. Celia Richardson, The Times reports today that National Trusters are the key to winning the next election. So what should the main parties been saying to convince the nearly 6 million members of the National Trust, and then brackets, clue? We know they care about nature protection and clean waterways. The clue's an interesting one, isn't it? Because of course, I love the National Trust. I mean, you know, one of the jobs I've always dreamt of is being Chair of the National Trust. I think it's the most incredible institution. And I guess it is incredible, I mean, to have that number of members paying whatever it is, £50 a year, is absolutely unbelievable in this day and age, that so many people, particularly when their finances are under pressure, really want to contribute to preserving

• 25:46Rory Stewart?

  not just nature protection, clean waterways, but also one of the bits I love about them, which are their historic houses.

• 25:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Rory, I think the current Chair of the National Trust, if I'm right, is called René Olivieri.

• 25:59Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes.

• 26:00Alastair Campbell?

  Now, if I reckon, given that the right, the hard right have been running this huge campaign against the National Trust on the grounds that they're too woke, it's one of those campaigns I just do not understand. But surely you, with your good... British name Rory Stewart should be better for the National Trust in this woke era than somebody with such a frankly foreign sounding name. So I think you're home and dry. Just get Lee Anderson behind you and you're home and dry.

• 26:32Rory Stewart?

  Lee Anderson's the key, isn't he? Always the key to everything.

• 26:35Alastair Campbell?

  You can be the king of the National Trusters. By the way, Celia Richardson, I know, and she works for the National Trust and she does a brilliant job, not least in fighting these ridiculous right wing people who are trying to take the whole thing over. But I'm a bit suspicious of these things. It's like when it's, you know, Mondeo Man, Vauxhall Man. Do you remember the Tories at one point had, it was Workington Rugby League Man?

• 26:59Rory Stewart?

  That's right, yeah.

• 27:00Alastair Campbell?

  So National Trusters, the serious answer to the question is the main parties should be persuading all of us, not just people who are members of the National Trust, that they care about the environment, that they care about our landscapes and that they care about our heritage. And I'd have thought all three of those things are vote winners. Here's another bit of free advice for Lee Anderson and the right of the Tory party, going around saying that, you know, this is woke to care about heritage and care about landscapes, not a very good idea.

• 27:35Rory Stewart?

  I think, so you may be simplifying the nature of the discussion. I don't think they're saying it's woke to care about landscapes and heritage. In fact, I think the debate is actually about a tension within the conversation about whether it is all about nature protection, clean waterways and how much it's about historic buildings.

• 27:54Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, okay, okay. Now here's one. Ian Hamilton, and Ian with two I's, so clue it's about Scotland. Being that the next Holyrood elections aren't for another three years, what would your strategy be for defeating the SNP compared to beating the Tories?

• 28:13Rory Stewart?

  I'd basically say chaos.

• 28:17Rory Stewart?

  Corruption, incompetence, inward looking, been in power too long, losing the plot. I'd run on that.

• 28:26Alastair Campbell?

  I think if you're Labour, I think in a way there's a case for drawing the SNP and the Tories together.

• 28:32Rory Stewart?

  Oh yeah, how would you do it? By connecting them in the same way?

• 28:35Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you've mentioned the factors, chaos, division, incompetence. And I also think the, you know, the sense that being together, we can get things done. And, you know, a strong, strong Labour presence in Scotland, working with a UK Labour government, will be able to focus on things like the economy and jobs and the health services and so forth, rather than just this sort of, you know, never ending independence question. And I think you're right. I think, you know, basically after almost 20 years of SNP government, 13 years of Tory government, it's time for a change, get rid of both of them.

• 29:09Rory Stewart?

  Time for a change. That's it. It's got to be time for change.

• 29:12Alastair Campbell?

  I think so. I think so. Yeah.

• 29:14Rory Stewart?

  Plenty more questions to come. Let's take a quick break.

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• 31:38Rory Stewart?

  Oh, here we are. Here's one I'd like a little bit of go of, and then I'm going to give it to you. Cassandra Najee, recently on the show, you've discussed Spain, Cambodia and Ireland, three countries that had 20th century internecine conflict. What are the components of an impactful peace and reconciliation process? And what processes have either of you been personally involved in? So before I hand you, I mean, you were very much involved in Northern Ireland, and we've interviewed Jonathan Powell. I have been part of an initiative sort of happening alongside the UN called the Principles for Inclusive Peace, which I've been involved in for a couple of years now with peace activists, ranging from grassroots activists in the Philippines to women of Iranian heritage,

• 32:19Rory Stewart?

  to great Dutch ex foreign ministers and many, many others. And it's a really interesting world because it's shifting very quickly.

• 32:30Rory Stewart?

  From an old world that used to focus quite a lot on heroic peacemakers, who were often people from the global north, who would sort of swoop in to an African country and win the Nobel Peace Prize for knocking heads together, towards an increasing understanding of the role of women, civil society, grassroots movements, and their role from the bottom up in trying to bring peace. But that then needs to find a kind of synthesis, which is to recognise that it's difficult to make that operate, honestly, with the Taliban or with al-Shabaab in Somalia, and that violence and guns and money. There's an amazing guy called Alex DeWilde, who writes about this.

• 33:13Rory Stewart?

  How much of these conflicts is actually about the cash economy and the way in which the militia groups and the men of violence are simply benefiting from money? And if you could find a way of tapping into the money in a different way. And in fact, he's been quite interesting, linking to the nonprofit I run, GiveDirectly, about thinking about how direct cash payments to people could actually reduce the likelihood of them joining militias and bring a form of peace. Anyway, back to you on peace and reconciliation.

• 33:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I guess, yeah, Northern Ireland you mentioned, the Balkans, some of the peace process in the Balkans I was involved in. And Jonathan Powell kindly reminded me of my, he seemed to blame me for the failure of the referendum that was part of the attempt to bring peace to Colombia. I think the single most important component is probably the desire or the existence of a stalemate where both sides feel they have to make change. And then within that, to try to find the areas of compromise where you can take people. But I mean, look, let's be frank, there are plenty of peace and reconciliation processes that haven't.

• 34:23Alastair Campbell?

  Concluded successfully and is still is still ongoing most, you know, most obviously, given what's happened in the last, just in the last 24 hours, yet another kind of terrible situation in Israel, Palestine.

• 34:37Rory Stewart?

  It's totally, totally heartbreaking. I mean, I remember going to Yemen and I arrived in Yemen pretty gloomy. So we're now back in 2014, thinking this is, I'd had a pretty prejudiced view of Yemen and thought it was always sort of kind of inherently pretty chaotic and violent. And I turned up and there was a very, I liked very much the UN negotiator at the time, a guy called Umar Bin Ali, who I think was a North African. And I remember meeting these amazing women's groups in Sanaa and civil society leaders and thinking, God, I've really got this wrong. There's actually very impressive groundswell of Yemeni activism. And then very rapidly, that all then fell to pieces again. And Yemen sort of slightly

• 35:21Rory Stewart?

  collapsed back into the kind of cliches that I'd had about it in the past.

• 35:25Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think we're going to need a peace process between the United Kingdom and Norway to resolve the the issue of the Orkneys? Have you followed this story today?

• 35:35Rory Stewart?

  No, no, go on, tell us about the Orkneys.

• 35:37Alastair Campbell?

  So the Orkney, the leader of the council up in Orkney, the Orkneys in Orkney is saying that, you know, they might look at alternative government arrangements.

• 35:47Rory Stewart?

  Oh, might might return to the Norwegians.

• 35:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they're not happy with the way their relationship with the UK government or the Scottish government. They think that they don't get a fair deal and it may be time to look elsewhere.

• 35:59Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's fascinating. Well, so to remind listeners, obviously, Orkney was part of Norway until the Middle Ages. And there are these great Viking sagas, the Orkninga Saga, which is all about an amazing Viking hero from the Orkneys. So I think there's a there's a real possibility of that. Do you think anyone in Britain would fight hard if the Orkneys tried to join Norway?

• 36:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we fought pretty hard over the Falklands.

• 36:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but I think that that was because the people of the Falklands didn't want to join Argentina. But if the people of the Orkneys wanted to join Norway.

• 36:28Alastair Campbell?

  But more interestingly, I think, is would the Scottish government put up a fight? Or would they think actually it would be a good way of showing that it's possible for these kinds of changes to be given? The opportunity for change to be given. They have had, they have had debates about this sort of thing in the past. Bizarrely and coincidentally, this story sort of emerged out, I felt, out of nowhere this morning. At a time when I'm, I'm literally halfway through a novel at the moment called Orkney.

• 36:58Rory Stewart?

  You recommend it?

• 36:58Alastair Campbell?

  It's really good. I really do recommend it. I think you'd quite like it. And it's, it's a, it's a kind of, well, I'm only halfway through, but it's a sort of, it's sort of a love story-ish. But it's got lots of kind of Arcadian magic around the place. And it's written by somebody called Amy Sackville, winner of the John Chloellen Rees Prize. So there you go. So I just thought that was quite weird that I was sitting there reading my book and up comes a news flash about Orkney.

• 37:26Rory Stewart?

  To finish with my own little literary contribution, I know I'm not allowed to say this, but I am actually rereading.

• 37:31Alastair Campbell?

  Rereading, you're rereading, yes.

• 37:33Rory Stewart?

  Probably for the fourth time.

• 37:34Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my God.

• 37:34Rory Stewart?

  A book which I really think is extraordinary, which is The Night Manager by John McCary.

• 37:40Alastair Campbell?

  And all I can say to that is that I, I saw the telly programme.

• 37:44Rory Stewart?

  It was a great telly programme, but the central character is actually, people will find if they read it, is loosely based, I think, on Alastair Campbell.

• 37:50Alastair Campbell?

  Ah.

• 37:51Rory Stewart?

  He's our hero is a man who speaks beautiful French and German, who's floating around in these hotels. And also turns out to be a bit of an action hero. So there we are. And so I, you know, read The Night Manager and reflect on the analogies to Jonathan Pine and Alastair Campbell.

• 38:05Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent. Thank you very much for that. I think flattering.

• 38:09Rory Stewart?

  No, I think, I think it is. I think it's quite, I think it's quite flattering. In your television series, Jonathan Pine was played by, one second, Tom Hiddleston.

• 38:17Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, he's another posh boy, isn't he? He's one of yours.

• 38:19Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's possibly, but, but possibly.

• 38:21Alastair Campbell?

  He's, he's an Estonian. Did he, was he in O'Hara as one of them?

• 38:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, one of those.

• 38:25Alastair Campbell?

  I think it was. By the way, just, I almost raised this on the cricket. Given that, as I outline in my book, But What Can I Do?

• 38:34Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 38:35Alastair Campbell?

  Eton College has possibly the greatest set of collected sports facilities in the UK. Why do we never produce any top sports people?

• 38:47Rory Stewart?

  Good rowers, good rowers.

• 38:48Alastair Campbell?

  Matthew, Matthew Pinson, I think was Italian. Right. Well, apart from that, who else is there?

• 38:53Rory Stewart?

  Um, don't know. Tim, Tim Henman was at my prep school with me, the tennis player.

• 38:58Alastair Campbell?

  That was not Eton, but can I?

• 38:59Rory Stewart?

  That's not, not, not Eton. Um, no, I think it's a very good challenge. Why is it not producing better sportsmen? So there was, there was, there was a guy, John Whittington of my year, who played county cricket reasonably well.

• 39:11Alastair Campbell?

  Lots of people have done that. I mean, that's, you know.

• 39:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but that's not, no, I agree with you. I'm, I'm absolutely with you.

• 39:15Alastair Campbell?

  So they have all those amazing facilities, which working class kids don't have. And yet the working class kids are better at sport than.

• 39:22Rory Stewart?

  Well, they're definitely better at, I mean, when it, I mean, I think that's the real thing where you see merit coming through is in football. Because it's amazing how, uh, doesn't matter how many facilities you've got. It, with a real mass sport like football, talent shines through. I mean, Maradona basically started with nothing, didn't he?

• 39:40Alastair Campbell?

  But I can't remember an Italian rugby player. I can't remember an Italian cyclist.

• 39:45Rory Stewart?

  I'm, I'm totally with you. Rowing is the only thing I can really think about. I'm going to be criticised by people.

• 39:49Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think maybe possibly Eton College Sports Department should be put into special measures?

• 39:54Rory Stewart?

  It's a good, it's a good challenge. It doesn't have many boys from it. It's only 250 boys a year. So it would be a bit improbable if they were dominating the world sporting scene.

• 40:02Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they dominated the bloody political scene in the last few years, haven't they?

• 40:05Rory Stewart?

  And you're right about Tom Hiddleston. He did go to the dragon school and eat them like me. That's true.

• 40:09Alastair Campbell?

  Lord, oh lord. So I'm not having him play me. No. I want to be played by whoever today's Albert Finney is. That's what I want. I don't, I don't want. Or maybe Richard Byrne would be good, but he's dead.

• 40:20Rory Stewart?

  This is a bit like me saying my favourite cricketer is Don Bradman. You're only seem to be able to think of actors who have from the 1950s. This is extraordinary.

• 40:28Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, James Norton. I think James Norton would like to play me. He's quite a good looking player.

• 40:32Rory Stewart?

  You're getting a Tony, Cary Grant, James Stewart, Clark Gable.

• 40:36Alastair Campbell?

  Shaun Bean.

• 40:37Rory Stewart?

  Shaun Bean. You managed to think of one actor alive today. That's very good.

• 40:42Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, what has happened? We were going to get Simon Henderson, the headmaster at Eton, onto leading.

• 40:48Rory Stewart?

  He's very keen to come on. He's very keen to come on. I wasn't quite sure we were doing head teachers. I thought it was all about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

• 40:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but he's interesting because that's a school that has created 20 prime ministers. I think what we should do, Rory, why don't we go and do the head teacher, the headmaster at Eton onstage at Eton in front of the kids?

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